


All that I can do

by sternflammenden



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-25
Updated: 2012-03-25
Packaged: 2017-11-02 12:31:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/369004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternflammenden/pseuds/sternflammenden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt was <i>Alannys Harlaw-- where is Theon? Where is my baby boy?</i></p>
<p>Written for the <a href="http://clashofqueens.livejournal.com/1527.html">ASOIAF minor character fic meme</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All that I can do

When she presses her mother’s hand, a jumble of bones and scant flesh, to her wind-blown cheek, Asha thinks that it will be enough, that her daughter, alive and whole, will satisfy Alannys’ tormented curiosity. But all that she can do is worry her lips, teeth nervously scraping at chapped flesh, her mouth reddening with both the blood and the tension. And when Mother finally speaks, her voice rusty from her self-imposed silence, she only speaks of her brother. 

“Theon,” she murmurs. Asha feels a twinge in her throat at the name. “Theon,” her mother repeats, caressing the name, “where is Theon?” The next words worsen the pain, which is blooming, raw. “Where is my baby boy?” 

She cannot find the words to answer such a question. Instead, she merely remembers, as her mother’s fingers brush against her hair, freshly cropped, damp with salt and mist. She remembers the husk that came to them in Stannis’ camp, a wraith, an old man, with a ruined girl clinging to him, her grip as iron. He was not her brother, not anymore, but had been transfigured into something beyond her grasp. She’d watched him sleep, his body crabbed with old injuries, tense with remembered torments, face drawn taut even in repose. And when he cried out cringing, wordless gibberings that she could not, would not decipher, she’d shaken him awake and given him the smallest amount of dreamwine that she dared, lest it would check his shallow breathing. 

She’d brought him back, she and Qarl, in the aftermath, but there was little left. In that way, he was of a pair with her mother, frail and bent, her filmy eyes staring at the sea from her narrow window, her hair spidery and winter white, her voice dried to a whisper. She had never been strong as Iron women must be, but it seemed to Asha that she faded more and more as the years passed, until now she was almost an afterthought. 

It pained her. 

“Where is Theon?” her mother repeated. “You did bring him back.” It was not a question; rather, it was a plea. “You promised me.” 

She nodded, blinking back a tear. A tear of regret, or rage, she could not say. “That I did.” 

And when she left her mother, Asha hoped that she would forget, that she could prolong things another day, that Alannys would forget as she did, and slip easily into the past, or lose what had come before. 

Yesterday she had told Asha to run and find her father and bid him come and greet his lady wife. 

_I will spare her_ , she thought grimly as she descended the stairs. _I will spare them both. It is all that I can do_.


End file.
